The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A farmer often faces difficult decisions when it comes to management of the farmer's crops. One such decision involves the application of nitrogen to a field during a crop's development. Many crops need access to nitrogen or nitrate in order to reach their maximum potential. A farmer may be aware that the farmer's crops will reach their maximum potential with the proper amount of nitrogen, but be unable to determine the optimal amount of nitrogen to apply to the field, when to apply the nitrogen, or whether application of nitrogen to the field is worth the cost of the nitrogen.
Application of nitrogen to the soil usually occurs early on in a crop's development. Machines that apply nitrogen to corn through side dressing often are unable to apply nitrogen past a certain point in the corn crop's development when the corn crop has grown too large. Thus, a cutoff point of nitrogen application generally exists around the V6 to V8 growth stages of the corn crop. For a farmer to apply the optimal amount of nitrogen, the farmer must understand the optimal amount of nitrogen to apply during the early stages so that the crop has sufficient nitrogen throughout the later stages of the crops development when applying additional nitrogen is impractical.
The optimal amount of nitrogen often varies from field to field, making it difficult for a farmer to follow a uniform rule in applying nitrogen. This occurs because different fields undergo different weather conditions and contain different soil compositions. Wetter fields tend to lose nitrogen and nitrate faster than dryer fields due to nitrogen leaching. While uniform rules for nitrogen application have been developed, they fail to take into account the locational dependence of the optimal application of nitrogen to the soil.
As the optimal nitrogen varies from field to field, the effects of each nitrogen application also vary from field to field. In some cases, a small amount of nitrogen may cause a large change in the total yield for a crop in one location while a large amount of nitrogen may be required to cause the same change in the total yield for a crop in a second location. Before a farmer decides to add nitrogen to the field, the farmer would want to know how the application would affect the total yield of the farmer's crop in order to determine whether the application of nitrogen is preferable to not applying the nitrogen.
There is a need for a system which identifies the effects of different applications of nitrogen to the total yield of a crop. Specifically, there is a need for a system that takes into account the location of the crop in order to accurately model the changes in the yield of a particular crop on a particular field based on a particular application of nitrogen.